Hello from Portugal

Hello from Porto, Portugal. I am here for a conference for work. (yes, tough life, I know)

Porto is a lovely town. I did not have a work engagement until 2pm today, so this morning I went over to the old city centre to see the sights. I’ve posted pictures to Flickr, and annotated them** with some highlights. My hotel room has a beautiful view of the city – the teaser for going to see the rest of the pictures:-)

One story that I don’t have a picture for… While out sightseeing this morning I was trying to find my way to the main shopping district. One thing about this town is that things are poorly signposted, which makes it hard to find your way around. While trying to find the main shopping district I was unclear if I was headed in the right direction, so I asked a fellow pedestrian if I was headed in the right direction.
My Portuguese is non-existent (despite the BBC quick fix site). I try, but what comes out of my mouth is a bizarre mixture of the little bit of French, German and Spanish that I know, plus my one word of Czech. I just pointed to the street on the map I was trying to get to and looked confused. The guy I stopped must have felt sorry for me, as he walked me 10 blocks to the street I was looking for. He chatted a bit with his tiny bit of English, which is always fun. He was very excited to know I worked for Microsoft, so excited he started talking very fast in Portuguese. When we got to the street he told me which way to go to find shoes (one word of English he clearly understood:-)) and proceeded to do the whole kissing on the cheek thing. Hilarious.

** I’m trying to annotate the pictures, but I’m in an impenetrable concrete hotel building, so both wireless internet and mobile has been flaky. May take a while to get all my online work done…